Quake

He has a recurring dream of magazines.

The first came years ago, before the losses started to add up.

In the dream, he is standing in front of an entire wall of magazines. The smell of ink and paper is competing with the redolent, sweet scent of tobacco that distinguishes the other half of the dark, dingy, downtown shop inspired by one he visits in the waking world.

The wall of magazines is an infinite playground. Five rows in the lower section, six above, both stretching to the left and the right like an artist’s exercise in perspective drawing. Every inch of the pale, pinewood rack shouts with color and typography. Women’s magazines in pink and white and yellow promise perfect skin. Wood-crafting magazines in walnut brown and forest green promise six steps to a perfect dining room table. Business magazines in black and silver and gold promise perfect portfolios.

Even in his dream state, he doesn’t care for such pointed promises. He has always been drawn instead to vague hope, the kind you find at the intersection of uncertainty and possibility.

He stands before the rack, scanning the shelves. He knows what he’s looking for – a science magazine, a commentary on the art of film, and one or two literary publications. In the waking world, he could name the magazines that define his desire. But in dreams, all of the magazines are new to him.

In the first dream, he finds everything he’s looking for and more. He carries a dozen magazines to the counter with an almost boyish glee. He is addicted to the drugs of anticipation and wonder. He buys two candy bars and a pack of gum and his mouth salivates before the dream fades.

In the years that follow, the magazine dreams continue. But what was once a wall of magazines in a magazine shop, over time, becomes a tiny, dusty display in a convenience store most notable for its lingering stench of burned coffee. There are only a few magazines to choose from, and he rarely finds one he wants. He thinks about the evolution of this dream when he is awake, and tries to convince himself that the diminishing magazine selection is merely symbolic of what’s happening in the real world. He knows that’s only a piece of the truth.

He hopes the magazine dreams end before the racks are completely empty.

His screensaver at work is a collection of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. The images confound him in all the right ways. Sometimes when he is daydreaming, he wonders about the edge of the universe. He is no scientist, but he’s read enough to know that astrophysicists are always attempting to define its boundaries. Once, he asked this question of a co-worker: “What kind of math could possibly exist that has the breadth to constrain or define the infinite?” His co-worker had been impressed by the rhetorical question, but quite rightly had no answer to give.

During the slow moments at work, and there are many, he imagines himself escaping his cubicle through the ceiling, rocketing through the Earth’s atmosphere, out of the solar system, past the Milky Way Galaxy, and straight on to the end of everything. The closer he gets to the imagined edge of the universe, the more he thinks about Horton Hears a Who. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to him. There has to be something bigger than the biggest thing. Something to look after the things that are smaller. When he returns from his daydream, he reaches over and caresses the closest of the Russian nesting dolls that decorate the only shelf in his cubicle. He owns seven sets of dolls. Six of the seven were given to him as gifts by friends and family who believed anyone who had one set of Russian nesting dolls must be a collector and want many. He has never opened any of them more than one layer deep.

There is a familiar song playing on the radio. He listens almost exclusively to one station at his computer. It’s a station that plays movie scores. Not the popular songs that define so many movie soundtracks these days, but the instrumental cues that in years past had always been performed by orchestras and probably are all done on computers now.

Movie scores are as close as he dares get to classical music. Any closer and he is overwhelmed by the weight of history and the embarrassment of having retained so little from his music appreciation classes.

The music that’s playing is from a movie he hasn’t seen, and never will. The hesitant interplay of piano and cello and the slow progression teasing resolution that never comes is its own movie. It’s a heartbreaking scene of such perfect beauty and perfect pain that he has to turn off the radio if he isn’t in a safe place for tears. His cubicle at work is usually one of those places because he keeps the music loud enough to mask the whimper and choke. But even there he sometimes changes the channel to chase away the memory of her skin and the look of desperate longing in her eyes.

“You okay in there?” It is his supervisor’s voice. She is a smart and kind woman. She knows how important it is to give him space to do his magic. And it is magic. This is the one positive truth he is able to hold onto about himself. His supervisor’s hair is wild and dark and the same wayward strand falls in front of her face whenever she bends down to study the mock-ups he’s assembled for a book cover meeting. She smells like fresh earth and her eyes are green, but they’re not quite the right shade of green so he doesn’t fall in love with her.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just working on something big.” He uses a variation of this excuse every time she worries aloud. She always accepts it because she knows brilliance sometimes comes with tears and she doesn’t want to do anything to frighten it away.

The drive home takes twenty-seven minutes on average. It’s a well-researched number, which he calculated only after recording the daily return times for more than three months. He doesn’t know how long it takes to drive to work. He’s always the last to arrive.

Often during the drive home he holds two competing thoughts in his head for at least three of those 27 minutes. One is a wish that he had an ice pick. The other is thankfulness that he doesn’t.

If he had one, he would retrieve it from the empty passenger seat where it would have been rolling around with every stop and turn, distracting him from the traffic on the road and the traffic in his head. He would play with it in his right hand, feeling the smooth grain of the polished wooden handle and the sharp point of the short, cold spike. He would wait for one of those rare moments in his commute when the road was empty and no one was staring into his window thinking, “Ichabod Crane,” and then he would thrust it into his thigh.

Sometimes when he imagines this he gasps. Sometimes he sighs.

And sometimes he makes a fist and punches his thigh instead. Never quite enough to leave a bruise. But always enough to remember why he’s thankful he doesn’t own an ice pick.

At the intersection of Ninth Ave. and Garden St, he slows for a red light. As he rolls to a stop, the ground begins to shake. He feels unbound for the briefest of moments, then he begins to laugh. It is an earthquake. This is the first he’s experienced while in his car. He looks over at the empty passenger seat and imagines the ice pick vibrating a warning like the cup of water in Jurassic Park.

He turns on the car stereo as the rumble subsides, and the same piano and cello tune begins to play from a CD he’d forgotten he’d made. Two blocks later, he approaches the town’s only Tobacco and Magazine shop and sees a rare empty parking space in front of it. He pulls into it, leaving the car running. There is a sign in the window he hasn’t seen before. “Now Leasing.”

This isn’t a magazine dream. This is the waking world and the shop has gone out of business.

He turns off the car and the stereo, and listens to the sound of his own tears without accompaniment or distraction.

It is a curious sound. A sad and beautiful sound.

The first aftershock shakes him out of his reverie and back to the smell of concrete and exhaust. When he realizes he has been rubbing his thigh, he stops, wipes a tear from his eye, then starts his car.

“There has to be something bigger than the biggest thing,” he says aloud, surprised by the strength in his voice.

Then he backs out of the parking space, and rockets away to find it.